The problem with using so many colors in a chart is it introduces a sense of complexity. People perceive more aesthetic designs as easier to use. They tend to be more engaged with a chart if it appears pretty.
A waterfall chart is used to show how an initial value is increased and/or decreased by a series of intermediate values, leading to a final value.
A cycle plot shows both days of the week/month of the year effect and trend/cycle in data. Cycle plots were created by Willian Cleveland and his colleagues in 1978 at Bell Labs.
For this week, I created a quick makeover using Datawrapper. My aim was to allow easy comparison between the 10 waste sources. I chose to use the trusted old bar chart.
Indexing data is an effective method to normalize the data to a common starting point and observe how variables change over time relative to each other.
The challenge with stacked bar charts is that if there is something interesting happening further up the stack, it becomes difficult to see because it is stacked on top of other things that are also changing. In this chart, with 7 different colours, it is hard to understand what’s going on.
A connected scatterplot is a scatterplot with a third ordered variable used to connect the encoding between X and Y positions. This third variable is often time.